The advantage of being out of power is that it gives a political party time to think and reflect. Better yet, it gives a party the opportunity to fight, and to fight with its most serious enemy, that is, itself.

What marks the modern age is a fracturing of human life from human thought. We have divorced science from art, commercial life from family life, the moral realm from the physical, the political realm from the economic, and so on. The Middle Ages provides a counterpoint to our current situation.

Before you signed the mortgage to buy your home, or the note to buy your car, or the credit slip to buy a hamburger at McDonald’s, the money to buy the home, the car, or the burger did not exist; it comes into existence in the very act of borrowing it.